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David Mamet, a.k.a. ‘Embittered Dave,’ Would Like a Word

In a new memoir, the filmmaker and playwright shares his opinions on Hollywood past and present: EVERYWHERE AN OINK OINK: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood.

David Mamet’s best plays have impeccable titles: “American Buffalo,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Speed-the-Plow,” “Oleanna.” So does his best nonfiction book, “Writing in Restaurants.” Now, late in his career, comes a miscellany called “Everywhere an Oink Oink.” Oh, boy. Here we go.

Sometimes you can judge a book by its title. “The more brainless a book’s intended readership, the more rib-nudgingly cute the title has to be,” James Hamilton-Paterson wrote in “Cooking With Fernet Branca,” his terrific comic novel from 2004. Mamet’s new one isn’t brainless. It’s just random, his mind on shuffle. It’s under-argued, rabid in its anti-wokeness and haphazardly written. Mamet’s idea of a transition nowadays is to write, “Anywaythzz (as Daffy said).” Reading this is not unlike sitting next to your Fox News-watching Uncle Alvin at Thanksgiving.

There is a difference, however, between Mamet and the typical post-Trump conservative commentator. (Mamet, who now writes for the National Review, has called himself “a reformed liberal.”) The difference is that Mamet has a hinterland. He’s written important plays and screenplays; he’s got a well-stocked mind; he has a self-deprecating sense of humor. I was willing to put up with his loose elbows, his belching, his dandruff and the way he repeats himself because he’s interesting and funny, at least a portion of the time.

You may not be able to put up with him. If drive-by remarks about “Diversity Capos” and “Covid annoyers,” cracks about liberal policies on immigration and the homeless, and a declaration that we know a movie villain now “by his white skin” will sink this one for you, so be it. Mamet has largely thrown away his career over this stuff, he acknowledges, “sidelined because of my politics (respect for the Constitution, etc.).”

The way to enjoy a meal seated next to someone you mostly disagree with, especially if they’re old (Mamet was born in 1947) and grouchy, is to look for the best in him — to seek common ground. So the rest of this review is going to be a bonsai-size rave, because I have a soft spot for this kind of throwaway, variety-hour book, of which Willie Nelson has also written several.

Mamet, like Nelson, deplores corporate fat cats and their minions, the guys with the roller bags. At least a quarter of Mamet’s book is an attack on film “producers” who do nothing but meddle and stamp their logos, as if they were graffiti artists, on other people’s work. In his book “The Tao of Willie” (2006), Nelson got off a joke about corporate guys that beats the ones here. “What do a record exec and a sperm have in common?” Nelson asked. “They both have a one-in-a-million chance of becoming a human being.”

The cover of “Everywhere an Oink Oink” is butter yellow, with all the type — the title and the author — in bright red. In the middle is a whimsical illustration of a pig wearing sunglasses. He is sitting at a desk in front of a typewriter, and a palm tree is visible through a window behind him.

In “Everywhere an Oink Oink,” which is subtitled “An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood,” Mamet works hard to be epigrammatical. He sometimes succeeds: “Directing a film is like playing chess while wrestling”; “I am willing to think ill of anyone, so I suppose I have an open mind”; “A laugh, like a lascivious glance, cannot be recalled”; “Hollywood is where Nope Springs Eternal”; “If you put cilantro on it, Californians will eat cat [expletive]”; “I’ve always found the Pacific Ocean a bore”; “never trust a Jew in a bow tie.” Chivalrously, he gives several of the best lines to his wife. She refers to money, we are told, as “shoe coupons.” What kind of dog did she want? The kind that “if you walk it, it dies.”

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